that, philosophers and theologians took
the Book as canonical and analyzed it as
such. Not surprisingly, their main ques-
tion was the one debated by Job and
his friends: Why does God allow evil in
the world?
The first single commentator to
whom Larrimore gives serious atten-
tion is Pope Gregory I, or Gregory the
Great (540-604), who wrote a six-vol-
ume study of Job. His book, as Larri-
more explains it, is our introduction to
many centuries of allegorical interpre-
tation of the Book of Job---indeed, of
the entire Old Testament---as parallel
to the New Testament; in particular,
Job's torment was thought to presage
the sufferings of Jesus. Some modern
readers find this sort of thinking far-
fetched, but it certainly wasn't con-
fined to the Middle Ages, or to Roman
Catholics. Luther's Bible, one of the
earlier vernacular testaments, had illus-
trations that combine, in the same
frame, events in Job that occurred many
verses apart. This was not to save
money on woodcuts. It was an expres-
sion of the view of time that had been
held for many centuries, by both Jew-
ish and Christian commentators. To
them, the Old Testament was divinely
inspired, and, if it seemed to contain
contradictions or errors, that was not its
fault but ours. We needed to dig for
deeper, subtler meaning.
According to Larrimore, this was
also, essentially, the opinion of the great
Jewish scholar Maimonides, in the
twelfth century, and of the formidable
St. Thomas Aquinas, in the thirteenth.
Aquinas, emboldened by the dispute
between Job and his friends, treated the
Book as a quaestio, or debate, the pri-
mary mode of learning at the University
of Paris, where he was a celebrated pro-
fessor. (Job won the debate, of course.)
As Larrimore points out, such a method
has the problem of omitting the matter
of the hero's extreme suffering. Mai-
monides, in his "Guide for the Per-
plexed," from 1190, is more modest and
quizzical, but he, too, obedient to the
tradition, says that we must yield to the
text's divine authority. In Job, he be-
lieves, we can understand God's mes-
sage only in glimpses. In 1536, John
Calvin wrote his "Institutes of the
Christian Religion," with meditations
on Job. Calvin's view was the most rad-
ical, in terms of theodicy---that is, the
attempt to reconcile the existence of evil
with a benevolent and omnipotent
God. Calvin said that God had a higher
justice, veiled to human eyes. Other
thinkers did not buy that. (After all, the
Old Testament shows God issuing
codes of justice for us---the Ten Com-
mandments, for example.) The prob-
lem was stated most succinctly two cen-
turies later, by David Hume: "Is he
willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not
willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he
both able and willing? Whence then
is evil?"
One logical answer is that there is no
God. But before the eighteenth
century, and during most of it, atheism
was not an option, even for the most
strong-minded. To choose between two
positions, a person must have two to
choose from. Before the Enlighten-
ment, the vast majority of Europeans
did not. Larrimore quotes the French
historian Lucien Febvre, writing in the
early twentieth century:
Today we make a choice to be Christian
or not. There was no choice in the sixteenth
century. One was a Christian in fact. One's
thoughts could wander far from Christ, but
these were plays of fancy, without the living
support of reality. One could not even ab-
stain from observance. Whether one wanted
to or not, whether one clearly understood or
not, one found oneself immersed from birth
in a bath of Christianity from which one did
not emerge even at death.
What Febvre said of the sixteenth cen-
tury was also true of the eighteenth
century and most of the nineteenth.
Bold minds might question God's care
of us, but few doubted his existence.
Larrimore quotes a passage from Vol-
taire's "Candide" (1759): " 'What
difference does it make,' said the der-
vish, 'if there is good or evil? When His
Highness sends a ship to Egypt, does
he worry about whether or not the mice
are comfortable on board?' " Voltaire
said that Candide was "Job brought up
to date."
Many philosophers, probably with-
out meaning to, inched their way to-
ward the same position. Kant said that
all we could do with doubts about God
was admit them. For Kant, Larrimore
writes, "the book of Job shows that the
problem of evil must remain an open
wound." Larrimore thinks that's still
true: that the dispute between Job and
his friends epitomizes modern thought.
There are no answers, only riddles. In
the face of that impasse, the discus-
sion often shifts from content to style.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
turies, a number of people who wrote
on Job---the German theorist Johann
"It looks like the internal bleeding should---I'm sorry. It's taking
everything in my power not to tickle you right now."